Charlotte native Patricia Alford Williams, veteran journalist and communications specialist, recently completed Place, her first novel. Williams, a former Charlotte Observer columnist, talks to DETOUR’s Ron Stodghill about the work, which explores love, family, and race in North Carolina during the Civil Rights era. Williams currently resides in Washington, D.C.

Ron Stodghill: First off, congratulations Patricia, on completing your first novel. What would you like readers to know about it? By the way, your rendering of the family farm is lovely, so much so that we’ve included it our Sanctuary series, the first work of fiction. Thank you for sharing it!

Patricia Williams: Thank you, Ron. My pleasure. What I’d like readers to know is that Place is a love story that begins in the 1950s South between young African Americans coming of age just as civil rights laws were being passed, opening up to them fuller access to America’s rich opportunities. It’s an intimate look into their segregated young lives and into the communities that raised them and prepared them to be “firsts.” It’s also about the loneliness and isolation that came with assimilating into white institutions and culture in order to take advantage of those opportunities.

RS: Talk a bit more about that, about that particular downside of racial integration that we sometimes overlook.

PW: Those of us coming of age just as civil rights laws were being passed also carried this fear from growing up under the constant danger of “stepping out of place” and finding themselves at the mercy of any white man who could take their lives at will with impunity from the law. That fear both motivated and stifled them. But the novel is also about the beauty and generosity of the land that provided them with abundance and a measure of independence from white commerce and about the faith that sustained them and was the source of their resilience.

RS: What can you tell us about the characters in your novel?

PW: The story mostly takes place in the 1990s and features three generations of African American women: an almost-90-year-old grandmother, Evelyn Bunny Rose, who has one foot in slavery as the adults in her childhood had been enslaved people; her educated and assimilated 50-year-old daughter, Elvira Rose Barrington, who is loved by two men, both of whom grew up as she did and both of whom become victims to the burden of being “credits to their race;” and her 17-year-old granddaughter, Kokeb Barrington, who is relatively privileged. It is about how racism threads itself through all three generations of women, morphing with each generation to survive the times, or as I write in the book, “lingering like ghosts of Africans past still hanging from trees” on the farmland of the family’s homestead in the Carolinas. The story is somewhat autobiographical in that it takes place in the times and places I have lived, but the details of the story are not all true to my life. It is a fictionalized entwinement of real, imagined, and historical facts, events and emotions.

RS: Did writing this novel teach you anything about yourself?

PW: Writing it required me to look deeply into my own fear and anger and insecurities and hurt from that time that helped shape who I am, and who many other African Americans are, today. Writing the book has been cathartic for me, and I hope reading it will be for some others, too.

This story was created by Detour, a journalism brand focused on the best stories in Black travel, in partnership with McClatchy’s The Charlotte Observer and Miami Herald. Detour’s approach to travel and storytelling seeks to tell previously under-reported or ignored narratives by shifting away from the customary routes framed in Eurocentrism. The detour team is made up of an A-list of award-winning journalists, writers, historians, photographers, illustrators and filmmakers.